Introduction

Official statistics show that approximately 23% of Wales’ population lives in incomedefined relative poverty and that 30% of children experience child poverty, most living in homes where at least one parent is in employment (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2018). It is likely that at least another 20% of people live close to the ‘poverty line’ with many families moving in and out of official poverty over time. Spatially this poverty is located within Wales’ largest cities, its former industrial heartlands and scattered around small rural and semiurban communities across Wales (Fothergill, 2012; Egan, 2016; ap Gruffudd, 2018). The negative effect of poverty on the health, wellbeing, education and lifestyles of the adults and children living in poverty is toxic (Adamson, 2008).

This impact of poverty on education is longstanding within Welsh society, but until the raising of the schoolleaving age to 16 in the late 1970s and the calamitous decline of the Welsh economy in the 1980s and 1990s, its full effects were masked by the availability of plentiful lowand semiskilled employment. In the 1980s awareness and concern grew over the apparently low educational qualifications profile of Welsh teenagers and what was then called the ‘long tail of achievement’ within the education system (Reynolds, 1990; Gorard, 2000). Following devolution of powers over education policy to the National Assembly for Wales in 1999, an increasing focus has been placed on the relationship between socioeconomic disadvantage and low educational achievement. It was accepted that compared to other parts of the UK, including areas with very similar socioeconomic characteristics, Wales always fared unfavourably (Welsh Government, 2002; 2005; 2006).

Unfortunately, however, this increasing focus on low achievement resulting from poverty became conflated within datadriven, PISAinfluenced, neoliberal education policies aimed at improving the education performance of the whole system through the highstakes testing and accountability regime imposed upon schools. Resulting from this, central and local government in Wales was able to claim that progress had been made in improving the attainment of children living in poverty at the ages of 7, 11, 14 and 16 and that, except in the case of 16yearolds, gaps between their achievement and that of more advantaged students had been closed (Welsh Government, 2014a).